Seven best practices for inclusive product design

At Pinterest, our mission is to help you discover and do what you love. We’re building a product for everyone, because the best Pinterest is inclusive and easily usable for people with all levels of abilities. That’s why today we’re sharing our…

Supporting React Native at Pinterest

Early last year, a small group of engineers started investigating the possibility of adopting React Native at Pinterest. We’ve been following the ecosystem with interest since it was first open-sourced in 2015. Since then, a robust community has developed around it, and it’s been…

Bottoms-Up: How the Pinterest growth team decentralizes team structure

On the growth team at Pinterest, we describe our structure as “bottoms-up”, meaning ideas and responsibilities flow throughout the team in a way that provides a lot of autonomy to work on the projects each person wants to tackle, across a variety of roles. The…

Cómo redujimos el tamaño de la aplicación de Pinterest para iOS en más de un 30% / 50 MB

This blog was originally published in English. To read the English version, click here. Todos sabemos que el tamaño de las aplicaciones es importante (el tamaño de descarga[1] y el tamaño de instalación local[2]). Además, existe una correlación…

Using PID controllers to diversify content types on home feed

Every day millions of Pinners visit the home feed to find inspiration on Pinterest. As a member of the home feed ranking team, it’s my job to not only figure out what relevant pins to show Pinners but also to make sure that…

Setting Up Snowflake Secondary Roles with Tableau

At Pinterest, we heavily utilize Tableau for our enterprise analytics. In an effort to secure access of sensitive data to the appropriate business units, we moved the enterprise data into a Snowflake data warehouse. Using Snowflake as a data platform, we can create and manage…

Adventures in big data wonderland: Going down the Pinterest Path

Have you ever started looking for plants on Pinterest, only to end up shopping for pillows instead? Ever find yourself layers of Pins deep into finding a new idea, not sure of how you got there or where you started? When Pinners are in…

How we designed our Continuous Integration System to be more than 50% Faster

Earlier this year, the Engineering Productivity team at Pinterest published a blog called How a one line change decreased our clone times by 99%. In that post, we described how a simple Git configuration sped up clone times in one of our…

Building board archiving and sorting

Connor Montgomery | Software engineer, Product Engineering A Pinterest tradition we’ve had since our early days is the Make-a-thon, our twist on a hackathon. Make-a-thons bring together employees from different disciplines to build something new. In the past, we’ve had projects range from scaling hacks to AR prototypes to…

PinSage: A new graph convolutional neural network for web-scale recommender systems

Deep learning methods have achieved unprecedented performance on a broad range of machine learning and artificial intelligence tasks like visual recognition, speech recognition and machine translation. However, despite amazing progress, deep learning research has mainly focused on data defined on Euclidean domains, such…

GokuL: Extending time series data storage to serve beyond one day

At Pinterest, developers rely heavily on Statsboard to monitor their systems and get alerted when issues happen. Last year, we introduced our time series database (aka Goku) which stores and serves the most recent one day’s…

Building Expanded Targeting for Pinterest Ads

With more than 300 million people coming to Pinterest each month, Pinterest offers unique opportunities for advertisers to get their products in front of people with commercial intent. Similar to other platforms, Pinterest offers a variety of advertising targeting products¹. Advertisers can…

User state-based notification volume optimization

Notifications play an important role in helping Pinterest’s 335M+ monthly active users discover and engage with inspiring content. It’s crucial to send the right number of notifications with high quality content. If we send too few notifications, Pinners might miss out on great opportunities…

Pre-Submit Integration Tests For Ads-Serving

Introduction & Background The ads-serving platform is the highest-scale, highest-complexity, and highest-velocity recommendation service at Pinterest. Our ads business is growing and expanding, and the ads engineering team is iterating quickly to continue to improve the system. Therefore, it is vital to keep the system healthy, in order…

Real-time experiment analytics at Pinterest using Apache Flink

At Pinterest, we run thousands of experiments every day, and rely mostly on daily metrics to evaluate performance. The daily pipelines can take 10+ hours to run and sometimes are delayed, which has created some inconvenience in verifying the setup of…

How ads indexing works at Pinterest

Introduction Ads indexing is a data processing pipeline that builds servable ad documents for the ads delivering stack at Pinterest, including ads targeting, retrieval, ranking and auction. The pipeline converts ad campaigns in the raw format to the servable format via a heavy computational…

Interest Taxonomy: A knowledge graph management system for content understanding at Pinterest

Interest Taxonomy at Pinterest We recently began rolling out the beta version of Pinterest Trends, a new tool that gives a view of the top U.S. search terms on Pinterest within the past 12 months, and a look into when search terms peak for…

How We Protect Pinners’ Passwords

Aalaa Satti | Software Engineer Amine Kamel | Head of Production Security At Pinterest, one method by which we ensure account security is through protecting Pinners’ passwords. Passwords can be problematic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that people tend to reuse their…

Virtual onboarding in the time of COVID-19: The new hire’s new normal

Cindy Xinyi Zhang | Data Scientist, Experimentation and Metrics Science On March 2nd, exactly one week before my full-time position at Pinterest started…

Fighting spam with Guardian, a real-time analytics and rules engine

As the Trust & Safety team, one of our major responsibilities is protecting Pinners from spam. Without protections, spam could potentially be all over Pinterest since spammers can script and generate activity at a rate much higher than actual users. One of…

Keeping Related Pins fresh

If you’ve ever heard someone mention “the Pinterest Rabbit Hole,” they’re likely referring to Related Pins, the ideas you see below a Pin you’ve tapped. Related Pins is a feed of content relevant to the closeup Pin and accounts for 40 percent of engagement…

Pinterest + ktlint = ❤

Ha pasado casi un año desde que la base de código Android de Pinterest se convirtió en la prioridad de Kotlin, y aproximadamente dos años desde que adoptamos ktlint para el formato y lint de Kotlin. Hoy, compartimos que Pinterest se…

How to Review Code as a Junior Developer

“Just ask questions.” That was the piece of advice that completely changed my perspective on code reviews. I first started as a Software Engineer at Pinterest on the Shopping Partner Experience team right out of college. I focused on my personal learning by reading documentation…

Partitioning Pinlater for Fun(?) and Profit(!)

Contained within the November 2015 announcement of the open-sourcing of Pinlater, our asynchronous job execution system, was a description of some of the improvements that had been made to the system since the original 2014 blog post describing its creation. Notable among…

Powering inclusive search & recommendations with our new visual skin tone model

To truly bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, Pinterest is committed to content diversity and to developing inclusive search and recommendation engines…